Sunday, September 28, 2008

How do we get more work done? It is a question that every manager and every passionate worker faces. Yet, for the most part, teams operate on gut instinct and habit. The results are less than optimal.

Over the years I've been collecting small pieces of research on various factors that actually seem to improve productivity. I've assembled eight of these experiments into a PowerPoint presentation. Feel free to use the graphs and data within to spread these practical ideas throughout your own teams.

Topics covered include:

The idiocy of prolonged overtime

The unintuitive connection between doing more and making better products.

Ideal team sizes and work environments

These lessons are particularly applicable to the game industry since it has some of the least educated management of any group in the software industry. In general, this is not their direct fault. We simply have a culture that tends to look inward (or at the movie industry) for solutions. A broader education on management and work practices, despite its ability to dramatically improve our games, typically takes a back seat to meeting the latest arbitrary, urgent deadline.

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About Me

I've been a game designer, pixel artist, toolmaker, physicist and MBA. My first job in college was on a game called Tyrian at a tiny company called Epic Megagames. These days, I'm the Chief Creative Officer at Spry Fox.